Biography

Three Many Cooks ladles out the highs and lows, the kitchen disasters and culinary triumphs, the bitter fights and lasting love. Of course, these stories would not be complete without a selection of treasured recipes that nurtured relationships, ended feuds, and expanded repertoires, recipes that evoke forgiveness, memory, passion, and perseverance.

America’s pioneer restaurant critic best known for the cake mixes, baked goods, and bread products that bear his name, but most people forget that Duncan Hines was a real person, an often-overlooked culinary pioneer whose love of good food led to his name becoming a grocery shelf favorite.

No Experience Necessary is Chef Norman Van Aken’s joyride of a memoir. In it he spans twenty-plus years and nearly as many jobs—including the fateful job advertisement in the local paper for a short-order cook with “no experience necessary.”

Los Angeles: A patchwork megalopolis defined by its unlikely cultural collisions; the city that raised and shaped Roy Choi, the boundary-breaking chef who decided to leave behind fine dining to feed the city he loved—and, with the creation of the Korean taco, reinvented street food along the way.

Before the heyday of the Food Network, there was Chef Tell, America’s first TV showman chef, big on personality and flavor. Most of Chef Tell’s forty million baby boomer viewers—a number comparable to Julia Child’s—never knew his fascinating, hardscrabble life story.

The long-awaited cookbook by one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s star chefs, David Kinch, who has revolutionized restaurant culture with his take on the farm-to-table ethic and focus on the terroir of the Northern California coast.

From James Beard Award-winning writer Elissa Altman comes a story that marries wit to warmth, and flavor to passion. Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best.

Like Eloise growing up in the Plaza Hotel, Charlotte Silver grew up in her mother’s restaurant. Located in Harvard Square, Upstairs at the Pudding was a confection of pink linen tablecloths and twinkling chandeliers, a decadent backdrop for childhood.

Break out the TV dinners! From the author who gave us Cod, Salt, and other informative bestsellers, the first biography of Clarence Birdseye, the eccentric genius inventor whose fast-freezing process revolutionized the food industry and American agriculture.

Eddie Huang is the thirty-year-old proprietor of Baohaus—the hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night—and one of the food world’s brightest and most controversial young stars.